It’s “National Youth Enrollment Day,” and the Obamacare Website Is Down

Dailem Delombard, Ronnie Cabrera and Maylin Lezcano holding Lucas Cabrera (L-R) sit with an insurance agent from Sunshine Life and Health Advisors as they try to purchase health insurance under the Affordable Care Act at the kiosk setup at the Mall of Americas on January 15, 2014 in Miami, Florida.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Happy National Youth Enrollment Day! For weeks Obamacare advocates have been planning a final push to get young people covered, starting with today. Hundreds of events across the country will promote and serve as one-stop-shops for the exchanges. One problem: Healthcare.gov is down for enrollment. Due to a scheduled maintenance of Social Security data verification systems, users will be unable to sign up for insurance until 5 a.m. ET on Tuesday, when the outage ends.

Advocates planning events for today, including Americorps, the American Cancer Society, United Way, and Young Invincibles, say they found out about the outage just this week when the Department of Health and Human Services released the information to the public on Monday. Today was to be the deadline for insurance starting March 1, but officials have extended the deadline to Tuesday, February 18.

The snafu is sure to continue to fuel doubts about the online exchanges and comes as the administration is still falling short of its total enrollment goals, particularly for young people. The latest enrollment data out this week showed that just 25 percent of enrollees are young adults between the ages of 18 and 34, compared to the original target of 40 percent.